had been the Lower East Side. After getting established there, they had moved into the middle class and uptown. In the Bronx's central and southern reaches, along Morris Avenue and the Grand Concourse, they spent a few fondly re- membered decades (neighbors, check- ers, stoop ball, Klingshoffer's Delicates- sen), until rent control caused the ele- gant apartment buildings to grow shabby, and poorer and newer immigrants and migrants began moving in. The city, in- spired by officials like Robert Moses, de- cided to change its housing profile in a way that attempted to discard the "scrof- ulous" (Moses's word) tenements en- tirely. By the late nineteen-sixties, thou- sands of Bronx families were eager to move agaln. Arthur Taub is a retired health-care consultant for the United Federation of Teachers, who came to Co-op City in 1970. He and I had coffee and talked not long ago in a diner at the Bartow Avenue shopping plaza in Co-op City. Arthur Taub has a full head of white hair and a blunt-featured, Hungarian face. To say that he is a good guy is not a value judg- ment but a simple description of the aura he gives off In reminiscent mode, Ar- thur T aub leans his head back, closes his eyes, and speaks slowly, in a gravel-toned Bronx voice. "I was born and have lived all my life in the Bronx," he told me. "The last place we lived before here was Kingsbridge Terrace near 231st Street. Mywife and I had two young daughters, and we liked the area, but the building was running down. I was paying a hun- dred and twenty-five dollars a month for a two-bedroom-pretty good, even for 1969-and mine was the highest rent in the building, so consider what the other tenants were paying. Some were paying seventy-five dollars, or fifty-nine. At those rents, the landlord couldn't afford to maintain it. Frequendy in the winter we had no heat, and we'd have to find other places to stay. We heard about the Co-op City project, with its spacious apartments and low equity and low main- tenance. We were looking for someplace we could live forever. We thought this was Shangri-La." Here the paths to utopia ran through bureaucracy. The beginnings of Co-op City involved print so fine as to be micro- scopic, and tape so red you needed dark glasses to view it full on. Co-op City's 58 THE NEW YORK.ER, JUNE 26, 2006 THE CENTAUR And when there was nothing that lay between us, not even the nothingness that had come to mean something-had meant something to me- we felt clumsy; irredeemable, somehow. And reason, that had once had over lust an effect like rinsing, now cancelled it out. He wept openly, like a man, like one who can't understand, or won't accept it, that the decision to refrain from killing- to cripple, instead-is a human choice, finally, not animal, the heart not so much broken as left beating in a metaphysical kind of disrepair that gets called a brokenness. When had the world become so inexact, or ourselves, who had lived too long, perhaps, inside it, so forgiving of inexactness? He shook in the light. Beside me. His arm lay thrown across my chest like a stole of foxheads, its glamour stranded now, somewhere between fetish and perverse sorrow. It was as difficult to know, anymore, the difference between being truly dissatisfied and merely unastonished as it was to look at him. But I did look: small birds-a-sway, then back again, as the bamboo sways them. . . I looked again: a hatch of flies, in a false spring whose falseness changes nothing of how it must feel, to have risen up into the air for the first time. -Carl Phillips basic purpose was to keep middle-class people like Arthur T aub from moving to the suburbs. The underlying philosoph- ical ethos its developers shared was a left-wing idealism-real, feigned, or both, depending on whom you ask. A nonprofit organization called the United Housing Foundation designed and spon- sored the project. Abraham E. Kazan, the president of the U.H.F., declared, "I am a coöperator, interested only in build- ing the coöperative commonwealth." Even today, residents of Co-op City are referred to not as tenants or shareholders but as coöperators. The U.H.F. was cre- ated in the fifties by leaders of the Amal- gamated Clothing Workers of America to build housing for union members. Jacob S. Potofsky, the head of the A.C.W.A., said that "all races, creeds, and colors" would live in Co-op City. The U.H.F. had already built a number ofN ew York housing projects, including Rochdale Village, an integrated five- thousand -eight-hundred -and -sixty- unit development in Qyeens. Most of the money for the Co-op City project came from the New York State Housing Finance Agency. The H.F.A. gave the U.H.F. a mortgage of two hun- dred and sixty-one million dollars, a sum larger than all the other mortgages it had